Jurassic Park! The not-so textbook evolution of… | Little White Lies

Juras­sic Park! The not-so text­book evo­lu­tion of Alan Partridge

08 Feb 2019

Words by Darren Richman

Man in suit standing in front of BBC entrance.
Man in suit standing in front of BBC entrance.
As Steve Coogan’s com­e­dy alias returns to the BBC, the character’s co-cre­ator and scriptwrit­ers reflect on the jour­ney so far.

There are fore­bears, of course. The delu­sions of grandeur are part of a rich lin­eage in British com­e­dy that stretch­es all the way back to Tony Han­cock via Del Boy, Basil Fawl­ty and Harold Step­toe. Yet Alan Gor­don Par­tridge, with his dis­tinct blend of nar­cis­sism and self-deceit, is arguably the defin­ing com­e­dy cre­ation of the last few decades. A thor­ough­ly mod­ern Frankenstein’s mon­ster (“Franken­stein is the name of the cre­ator, not the mon­ster”) with an ego to rival Dame Edna in her pomp.

In a sense, Alan has evolved with the times. Just as the racism exhib­it­ed by Major in Fawl­ty Tow­ers gave way to David Brent extolling the genius of Den­zel Wash­ing­ton to a black col­league in The Office, prej­u­dice man­i­fests itself in dif­fer­ent ways depend­ing on the era. The intrigu­ing thing about Steve Coogan’s most famous role is that he’s had to grow up in pub­lic, from the unre­con­struct­ed Thatcherite of the ear­ly years to the right-on” attempts at tol­er­ance that char­ac­terise more recent incarnations.

Patrick Mar­ber, whose screen­writ­ing cred­its include Clos­er and Notes on a Scan­dal, co-cre­at­ed the char­ac­ter and starred along­side Coogan in On the Hour, The Day Today and Know­ing Me Know­ing You with Alan Par­tridge on radio and TV. He insists it was nev­er intend­ed for Alan to reflect the dif­fer­ent eras he’s inhab­it­ed. We wrote a bit of back­sto­ry back in the day,” he says, but only enough to give Steve things to make jokes about. For the first radio show we gave him Nor­wich, Pear Tree Pro­duc­tions, the sweaty des­per­a­tion, the mid­dle Eng­land jovial crass, Car­ol, Denise, Fer­nan­do, ABBA, a mid­dle name – but in truth we didn’t need to dis­cuss the char­ac­ter’ that much because it was ful­ly formed with the voice and the man­ner. From day one we all knew exact­ly who he was.”

So did the first radio audi­ences. While Coogan hadn’t quite nailed the accent by the time Par­tridge made his on air debut, the character’s voice had been honed to per­fec­tion by the writ­ers. He was an ego­tis­ti­cal bore, a con­ser­v­a­tive with a big and small C and the worst pos­si­ble host for a talk show. Mar­ber, Coogan and Arman­do Ian­nuc­ci, all in their late twen­ties at the time, were mock­ing the kind of age­ing broad­cast­ing fig­ures satirised by the likes of Smashie and Nicey. But Par­tridge was always so much more than a sketch char­ac­ter, as ful­ly-realised as a Mike Leigh pro­tag­o­nist but with much fun­nier jokes.

Man in a blue jacket singing into a microphone in a recording studio.

The tran­si­tion to tele­vi­sion was inevitable, at which point, Mar­ber explains, the cre­ative team spent more time writ­ing and talk­ing about the guests than the host.” After the chat show came to an end fol­low­ing a mod­er­ate­ly suc­cess­ful six-episode run and a Christ­mas spe­cial, Mar­ber pur­sued a career in the the­atre and Peter Bayn­ham joined Coogan and Ian­nuc­ci in con­coct­ing the sit­com I’m Alan Par­tridge. Mar­ber was uncon­vinced by the ear­ly scripts but the writ­ers trust­ed their instincts and the first series, released in 1997, is now an epochal work in British tele­vi­sion comedy.

A sec­ond series fol­lowed in 2002, after which Coogan attempt­ed to crack Hol­ly­wood and Alan went unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly qui­et. In 2010, the char­ac­ter made a mod­est come­back with the web series Mid Morn­ing Mat­ters, which chart­ed Partridges’s return to his roots as a local DJ on North Nor­folk Dig­i­tal. By a strange quirk of fate, the sec­ond series of I’m Alan Par­tridge began on BBC Two in the same slot occu­pied by the sec­ond series of The Office a week after that show had end­ed. View­ers com­plained about the laugh­ter of the stu­dio audi­ence, some­thing nobody had object­ed to in the mid 90s. The Office had changed the game but the sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion­ship between the two char­ac­ters was unde­ni­ably ben­e­fi­cial. By going back to basics and adopt­ing an almost mock­u­men­tary for­mat, Mid Morn­ing Mat­ters was a glo­ri­ous return and proved that, while Par­tridge had inspired Brent, the reverse was now also true.

Neil and Rob Gib­bons are inte­gral to the direc­tion Par­tridge has tak­en in the past decade. The twin broth­ers co-wrote Mid Morn­ing Mat­ters along with the Sky spe­cials, books and a fea­ture film, Alan Par­tridge: Alpha Papa. Coogan has stat­ed that Par­tridge was orig­i­nal­ly envi­sioned as a decade old­er than the per­son play­ing him, and Neil feels the character’s age has played a cru­cial part in his evo­lu­tion. He start­ed out as a man who was fusty before his time,” he explains, like when you see a school­boy with a brief­case. He’s frigid and uptight. That becomes less fun­ny when he’s get­ting on in years, because they’re traits you already asso­ciate with old­er, rightwing peo­ple. So we loos­ened him up. He’s now an old­er man clum­si­ly going out of his way to be on-trend, hap­py to talk about his sex life or his anus with a straight face, which is excru­ci­at­ing in a dif­fer­ent way.”

Rob was sim­i­lar­ly keen to ensure that the char­ac­ter kept mov­ing for­wards. The trick is to retain the DNA that makes Alan Alan with­out let­ting the char­ac­ter stag­nate,” he says. We were for­tu­nate when we came on board that Alan had been in cold stor­age for a few years, so we had licence to update him. He’d fea­si­bly have changed slight­ly in the inter­im, as peo­ple do from one decade to anoth­er, so we nev­er felt straight­jack­et­ed by what had gone on before or that we had a tem­plate we had to stay within.”

Coogan claims he’s become clos­er to the char­ac­ter down the years, and Rob is inclined to agree. When we made Mid Morn­ing Mat­ters it was Alan in close-up, which meant it couldn’t be quite as broad as the Alan of I’m Alan Par­tridge, a stu­dio sit­com with a live audi­ence. Instead, a lot of the com­e­dy came from the minu­ti­ae – into­na­tion, facial tics, choice of lan­guage. So it nat­u­ral­ly had to feel more real which meant writ­ers and per­former draw­ing on them­selves, if that doesn’t sound too wanky.”

A smiling man wearing headphones and speaking into a microphone in a radio studio.

Like Mar­ber and the character’s orig­i­nal cre­ators, the Gib­bons broth­ers didn’t spend a great deal of time think­ing about what Alan might say about the times in which he lives. There was no man­i­festo and they didn’t feel as though they were safe­guard­ing a bona fide nation­al trea­sure. As Neil says, I don’t buy all that guff about pro­tect­ing the lega­cy. When they remade Psy­cho or did the Mary Pop­pins sequel and fans were wring­ing their hands about it, I nev­er got that. The orig­i­nals, the ones you like, they’re all still intact. Who cares? Not that we don’t want to make good stuff, but we’re not pro­tect­ing the Holy Grail.”

Rob insists they nev­er thought of the work as a respon­si­bil­i­ty, point­ing out that, The char­ac­ter had been all but retired when we were brought on board, so this is all bonus con­tent.” And what con­tent it is – their con­tri­bu­tion has unde­ni­ably giv­en Par­tridge a new lease of life and brought him kick­ing and scream­ing into the mod­ern age. A key fac­tor in Partridge’s evo­lu­tion, of course, is Coogan him­self, who Rob describes as a dream col­lab­o­ra­tor. He brings no ego to the table so from the start it felt very demo­c­ra­t­ic. It was such a laugh [writ­ing new mate­r­i­al] though. Still is.”

Mar­ber, mean­while, has enjoyed the tran­si­tion from writer to view­er and remains a huge fan. Over the years dif­fer­ent writ­ers and Steve have intro­duced numer­ous oth­er ele­ments, quirks, sto­ries and details, all to the good to vary­ing degrees. Steve/​Alan still makes me laugh like I used to in the ear­ly days.”

Par­tridge is final­ly return­ing to the BBC this Feb­ru­ary in This Time with Alan Par­tridge, a spoof cur­rent affairs pro­gramme in the style of The One Show. Ear­ly word sug­gests a blend of Know­ing Me, Know­ing You and I’m Alan Par­tridge, per­haps some­thing akin to The Lar­ry Sanders Show, a show often cit­ed by Ian­nuc­ci as a major inspi­ra­tion for The Thick of It. It will be yet anoth­er ven­ture into unex­plored ter­ri­to­ry for Par­tridge, but excit­ing­ly there’s every indi­ca­tion that the best is still to come. Who knows what the future will hold for Alan. Maybe he’ll final­ly get around to mak­ing Mon­key Tennis.

This Time with Alan Par­tridge airs on BBC One at 9.30pm on Mon­day 25 February.

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